hey
say hats went out of style," said Shellie McDowell, "but they never did in the
church."
hey
say hats went out of style," said Shellie McDowell, "but they never did in the
church."
Ms. McDowell should know. As the owner of Shellie McDowell Millinery in East New York, Brooklyn, she is one of the nation's top designers of church hats for black women, who she says constitute the largest hat market in the country. With a customer base of 3,000 women, Ms. McDowell makes and sells about 4,000 hats a year through catalog mailings, the Internet (shelliemachats@aol.com), at trade shows and at personal appearances at church conventions. Her hats are sold in boutiques from Berkeley, Calif., to Fairfield, Ala., and her clients are as varied as Oprah Winfrey and Kathy Sharpton, the wife of the Rev. Al Sharpton. Ms. McDowell also flies regularly to Memphis, world headquarters of the Church of God in Christ, a Pentecostal church that counts five million members worldwide.
"These women dress for a sacred event every week," Ms. McDowell said in her workroom recently, dressed in classic New York black. "It's not a `my son is getting married, once in a lifetime' event. Every week they wear outfits — suits or dresses, hats, shoes and pocketbooks, and they all have to match. These women are wearing St. John suits at $2,000 each, so you can't put a $99 hat on your head. The accessories have to be on the same level as the suit."
Ms. McDowell's hats start at $225 for the relatively unadorned and go as high as $800 for elaborately beaded versions. The prices are not as high as they sound, though, considering that each hat is hand blocked (molded into shape on a wooden block), hand sewn and hand trimmed. "The average department store doesn't do hand-blocked hats," Ms. McDowell said. "They're stamped on a machine."
But the trick, she added, is that unlike the everyday world of fashion, church fashion operates on the principle that no one wants to look like anyone else. "It's the opposite of how it usually works," she said. "You go down the street, everyone is wearing a Burberry something. None of these women want to go to church and see themselves."
The tradition of church hats was the subject of "Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats," by Michael Cunningham and Craig Marberry (Doubleday, 2000), which also included oral histories from the women about the meanings of hats in their lives. The African tradition of adorning the head for worship has passed from generation to generation, and in this country, during slavery, when the only place blacks were allowed to congregate was church, it intensified. The hat became a symbol of prosperity, and of celebration. The women interviewed for the book owned an average of 54 hats each (seven owned more than 100) and they consider each hat to be a deeply personal expression of who they are. "I'd lend my children before I'd lend my hats," said one. "I know my children know their way home."
Regina Taylor, a playwright, director and actress who won a Golden Globe Award for her role as Lilly Harper on the television series "I'll Fly Away," read the book and loved it, and "Crowns," her stage adaptation (which she also directed), played in October at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J. It opens on Tuesday at the Second Stage Theater in New York and features hats by the show's costume designer, Emilio Sosa.
"I understood and respected the women in the book," Ms. Taylor said. "It's been a tradition from slavery that if you had something nice you'd wear it to church, and after slavery you'd wear it to show you had something. To get a nice hat made a statement of where you were in the world and who you were."
That hasn't changed. Mrs. Sharpton, who does not seem to share her husband's fondness for the media, sent a statement through a spokeswoman: "A church hat should make a statement both about the person wearing it and the designer. Most of mine say, `My God is an awesome God. I praise him and I love him and because he is my father and I his child, I just gotta look fabulous.' "
Making thousands of women look fabulous in one-of-a-kind hats is no easy task, but Ms. McDowell takes it in stride. "It comes to you," she said of her designing process. "I just keep adding and adding until it feels complete." She works on the ground floor of the two-family house where she lives with her husband, Derek McDowell, a lawyer (they met at church) and their two young sons. The blocking is done in the basement, and upstairs two men work the sewing machines in one back room while three women finish and trim the hats in another.
On a recent morning, one woman wound trim around the crown of a tall lime green hat. Um, lime green? Ms. McDowell smiled. "These women want to be seen," she said. "If I go to the Church of God in Christ without rhinestones, I'm coming back. They're begging for jewels."
She took an elaborate hat from the top of a hat tree. "This is gold metallic lace from Switzerland and a veil studded with Austrian crystals," she said. "You know, I go to trade shows to hear the color forecasts and what's hot, and it has absolutely nothing to do with what these women feel like wearing to a house of God."
Although there is no organization that monitors the growth or sales of this industry, Irenka Jakubiak, the editor in chief of Accessories magazine, a monthly trade publication, said: "Hats made specifically for church is a segment of the business that is growing tremendously, and most people don't realize it's there because it is somewhat regional. But it's an exploding category. Women who go to church see it as an opportunity not only to pray but to express themselves. These hats are not for the shy."
Ms. Jakubiak said that based on department store figures, total hat sales for 2000, the last year in which statistics are available, were $865 million. She estimates that 18 percent of that total was in the Northeast church market, while in parts of the South it can reach 35 percent.
Ms. McDowell is working as fast she can. It takes her four weeks to make a hat, and she has some definite rules about wearing one. "It has to be wider than your face," she said. "But if a woman is short she shouldn't wear very wide hats. A closer brim is better. Also, hairdos and hats are competitors. You either wear hair or a hat, not both." Customers are so intent that the hats match their outfits, they mail Ms. McDowell their suits. "I have a teal St. John suit here now," she said. "And I have one customer who comes in on a walker so she can show me her suit. She has to be right."
Ms. McDowell herself was raised in a Pentecostal church and she is a minister at the New Life Cathedral in East New York. "In some churches they feel it's not important to wear a hat," she said, "but we consider going into the presence of God to be a high holy experience. You appear before the king in royal attire." The job is best left to women, however. Men are not obligated either to cover their heads or to wear anything more elaborate than a suit.
It's hard to believe that Ms. McDowell came to hatmaking by accident. Before starting in the hat business in 1988, she spent 15 years at the Social Security Administration, rising from clerk to branch manager. When her son was born she left, and her sister Lois suggested that they buy hats wholesale, then sell them in what Ms. McDowell called "living room boutiques."
"I can't say it was my dream," she said. "But she had the fashion savvy, I had the business background and we named our company SheLo, for Shellie and Lois. We went from church to church and began to develop a customer base." Ms. McDowell also enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology to learn more about retail sales. She signed up for a class called millinery techniques without realizing it was hatmaking. Unable to get her money back, she stayed, and found to her surprise, that she liked it. "I didn't know the gift was in me," she said.
Ms. McDowell started mixing her own designs into SheLo's merchandise, until finally, she sold only her own. With no marketing budget, she sent pictures of her hats to Essence by Mail, and a buyer called and asked if she could do large orders. "I didn't know I couldn't, so I said yes," Ms. McDowell recalled. "The first order was for $50,000."
And what happened to her sister? "Well, I was moving at the pace I was moving, and it just wasn't for her," Ms. McDowell said. "We went from SheLo to She Left." Shellie McDowell Millinery, founded in 1991, is privately owned, and she does not disclose earnings, though it can't hurt to have clients like Ms. Winfrey, and maybe more important, Louise Patterson, the wife of Gilbert E. Patterson, the presiding bishop of the Church of God in Christ.
"She wore my hat to the convocation," Ms. McDowell said, referring to the church's annual gathering, "and after the service there was a long line in front of my booth." Ms. McDowell sold 200 hats there.
Mrs. Patterson, speaking by telephone, said: "Shellie has her own flair, which is to me, ageless. I don't really feel dressed without a hat. She can make them as grand as you like or as demure. Her hats are the most widely worn. People just flock to where she's selling them."
Ms. McDowell hopes they'll flock to Crown Heights early next year, where she plans to open her first store. Though she will sell jewelry and clothing in addition to hats, she already knows her customer.
"The fashion industry doesn't give me attention, because this is not what the rest of the world is doing," she said. "My expression and acceptance are in the church."